In the _Annales de Chimie_, 85-288, there is a list of rains said to
have contained sulphur. I have thirty or forty other notes. I'll not use
one of them. I'll admit that every one of them is upon a fall of pollen.
I said, to begin with, that our methods would be the methods of
theologians and scientists, and they always begin with an appearance of
liberality. I grant thirty or forty points to start with. I'm as liberal
as any of them--or that my liberality won't cost me anything--the
enormousness of the data that we shall have.
Or just to look over a typical instance of this dogma, and the way it
works out:
In the _American Journal of Science_, 1-42-196, we are told of a yellow
substance that fell by the bucketful upon a vessel, one "windless" night
in June, in Pictou Harbor, Nova Scotia. The writer analyzed the
substance, and it was found to "give off nitrogen and ammonia and an
animal odor."
Now, one of our Intermediatist principles, to start with, is that so far
from positive, in the aspect of Homogeneousness, are all substances,
that, at least in what is called an elementary sense, anything can be
found anywhere. Mahogany logs on the coast of Greenland; bugs of a
valley on the top of Mt. Blanc; atheists at a prayer meeting; ice in
India. For instance, chemical analysis can reveal that almost any dead
man was poisoned with arsenic, we'll say, because there is no stomach
without some iron, lead, tin, gold, arsenic in it and of it--which, of
course, in a broader sense, doesn't matter much, because a certain
number of persons must, as a restraining influence, be executed for
murder every year; and, if detectives aren't able really to detect
anything, illusion of their success is all that is necessary, and it is
very honorable to give up one's life for society as a whole.
The chemist who analyzed the substance of Pictou sent a sample to the
Editor of the _Journal_. The Editor of course found pollen in it.
My own acceptance is that there'd have to be some pollen in it: that
nothing could very well fall through the air, in June, near the pine
forests of Nova Scotia, and escape all floating spores of pollen. But
the Editor does not say that this substance "contained" pollen. He
disregards "nitrogen, ammonia, and an animal odor," and says that the
substance was pollen. For the sake of our thirty or forty tokens of
liberality, or pseudo-liberality, if we can't be really liberal, we
grant that the chemist of the first examination probably wouldn't know
an animal odor if he were janitor of a menagerie. As we go along,
however, there can be no such sweeping ignoring of this phenomenon:
The fall of animal-matter from the sky.
I'd suggest, to start with, that we'd put ourselves in the place of
deep-sea fishes:
How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from above?